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Re: Planet of the New Papers
Jerry D. Harris writes:
... Now, I personally seem to be missing whatever key brain lobes
are required for easy assimilation of other languages; my sister, however,
picks them up very easily.
You can blame your Y chromosome there. The brains of women are (generally
speaking) better wired for multi-tasking than those of men. When an adult is
learning another language, they initially have to translate in their head
'on the fly'. Once you're familiar with a language you no longer have to
mentally translate it though.
...But believe
me, if an opportunity to learn Chinese comes along, I'm taking it.
Good luck. Tonal languages are amongst the hardest to learn (at least as far
as speaking them goes). Just a slight change in inflection can change the
meaning of a sentence entirely. And all those characters..! The illiteracy
level amongst Chinese people themselves is one of the highest in the world.
That's not becasue a lot of Chinese people can't read or write, but rather
because the 'basic' literacy level involves memorising hundreds of
characters (out of a total of more than 47,000).
We're light years away from a common global language, if such is ever
achieved; even if one arises, I seriously doubt it'll be English, or at
least the English we currently recognize.
Unless science fiction programs are to be believed, in which case every
intelligent species in the universe will eventually speak english.
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Dann Pigdon
GIS / Archaeologist geo cities.com/dannsdinosaurs
Melbourne, Australia heretichides.soffiles.com
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